Stephen Browne Interview. June 15, 2004.
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When it comes to poverty reduction, what role does Information and Communications Technology (ICT) play?
There are innumerable ways in which ICT can be applied to deliver better services to poor people, whether it’s telemedicine, using ICT to bring medical care to people in remote areas, or e-schools, using ICT to enhance the delivery of curricula to remote areas. There is a wide variety of practical applications, and I’m referring to actual examples in a growing number of countries where these applications have been put into practice with great effect. The most important general contribution that the emerging information society can provide to people everywhere, however, including the poor, is access to knowledge and an empowerment mechanism by which they can themselves take hold of their own lives and seek to improve them.
In January 2004, the UNDP and Microsoft jointly put out a press release announcing a partnership. What has developed as a result?
This is something that will build over time. I think that the synergy between UNDP ICT and Microsoft results from our respective global vocations, but unlike Microsoft we look for highly differentiated solutions to problems at the country level and within countries at the local level. In other words, we eschew the idea of there being a single solution for every problem. Now, you might say that is contrary to the Microsoft idea, which is complete uniformity in their software applications. But no, we’re helping Microsoft identify areas in which their standard software applications can actually be applied in specific organizational or other contexts. I think that we’ve learned a lot from each other so far. Concretely, we are building this partnership in a few countries, such as Morocco and Mozambique, and we hope to spread this outward.
But let me also say that we have certainly not decided that all the software solutions for the developing countries are going to be based on Microsoft technology. We are very keen to encourage countries and organizations and individuals within them to make their own choice of the best software solution. In Afghanistan, for example, we identified telecenters that could be empowered with free Microsoft software, while at the same time educating people about the advantages in other contexts of open source technologies. As I say, we look at different solutions to different problems. Where we can work with Microsoft and see that their product can bring an advantage to a particular situation, then we’d be delighted to help them find an opportunity. On the other hand, we look for other solutions, many of which include the rivals to Microsoft. Chief among them is the open source non-proprietary software.
As with countries like Bulgaria and Brazil, which tend to favor free and open source software.
I was about to mention Bulgaria as a good example of a country which, for its own reasons, has decided that in much of its public sector it wants to go for an open source solution. And we’ve been ready to help them on that. We try to be non-conflictual about it. We believe in using partnerships to the advantage of our clients. And this doesn’t mean that we have a single standard solution. That doesn’t mean to say that we are going to be inviting all of our program countries around the world to use Microsoft exclusively just because we have a global arrangement with them. We will be fairly opportunistic and see where it is that countries find Microsoft to be an advantage and where they don’t.
If and when there is a greater global demand for free and open source software (over proprietary), I wonder if Microsoft will respond accordingly?
That’s a good question. We sometimes use an analogy with HIV/AIDS treatment, which has become, not non-proprietary exactly but generic, available at drastically reduced cost to the developing countries. We would like to see the same sort of thing happen here. And I think it is beginning to happen through Microsoft, providing what are otherwise to some of us quite expensive products at drastically reduced prices, or even providing them free of charge. We hope that this could be one of the great benefits of the partnership.
How are citizens of the developing world beginning to use the Internet to promote political accountability?
This is where I believe our work on ICT for development as one priority and the work on democratic governance as a second priority very definitely overlap. I spent some of my most interesting years with the UNDP as the UN representative in Ukraine very shortly after it had become an independent country. I was able to appreciate there the idea of the Internet having contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. I experienced the post-Soviet phase, and saw the extraordinary impact that access to information had for 50 million people who, with very few exceptions, had really never had access to any kind of information from the outside, or even a dialogue through international telephone lines. We were providing them with free dial-up service, and so I witnessed some Ukrainians who were ready to sit in front of a computer for almost 24 hours without stopping, notwithstanding the language barrier, as the Internet was very much and still is some what dominated by English, just browsing and informing themselves and communicating with people who had been remote to them before.
All of that can certainly have an important impact on political processes. I don’t believe that the mere existence of the Internet is an automatic panacea for closed societies. But there’s no question that it’s going to be more and more difficult for societies to remain enclosed and immune from opinion within their country and outside their country.
What will it take to get the entire world population participating in the global networked economy?
I was looking at some statistics the other day. There are expected to be by the end of this year one billion users of the Internet. That’s a pretty extraordinary figure. That’s one billion out of about seven billion people. When you think that only a few years ago, in the year 2000, there were only 200 million users of the internet; it’s gone up by five times in five years, more or less. That’s pretty extraordinary. So, to a considerable degree, we are becoming a partially networked world.
But there are two major impediments to a fully networked world. One is the infrastructure, and how we can reach the most remote areas in a way that is financially viable. It’s a big challenge, although there are a number of solutions now emerging. The other problem is language. Although the proportion of pages of the Internet in English is steadily diminishing, and I think soon the next most popular language is going to be Chinese, there are inhibitions to people communicating across countries in different languages; but even more important, of course, is literacy rates. People who are not literate are not able, of course, to take the same advantage of being connected as those that are. The digital divide is really only a technological manifestation of the same old development divide with which we have been familiar for so long. We have to tackle both. It’s not merely a question of miraculously delivering telephones to every remote corner of the developing world. We will overcome the digital divide if we overcome the societal divide. This means bringing everybody, without exception, fully into the development process.
Do you feel that the bridges are being built?
Yes, I do. It partly depends on the activities of organizations like UNDP and other development partners, like The International Development Research Centre (IRDC) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). It largely depends on the kinds of initiatives which countries themselves can take. There’s a huge amount that developing countries can do to open themselves to the information society. There are large and quite complex political decisions that they have to make. More openness to investment by technology companies in these countries will help to facilitate the kind of change which I think could bring about what is being described as a revolution.
Stephen Browne is the director of the United Nations Information Communications Technology for Development special initiative.
Massive Change Radio was broadcast on the University of Toronto’s CIUT 89.5 FM from September 2003 to June 2004. Created and hosted by Jennifer Leonard, co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004) and former Institute without Boundaries team member, the entire season of multidisciplinary interviews is archived for download.
